Saturday, 1 February 2014

The second life of Second Life

Virtual Reality might be both the saviour and the slayer of
our metaverse.

Depending on who you listen to, Second Life is either taking its last
few gasps – hence the departure (voluntary or otherwise) of CEO Rod Humble – or
is getting ready for new life to be breathed into it via a renewed interest in
virtual reality (VR). The commercial release of the Oculus Rift headset is
potentially less than a year away and VR is starting to become a hot topic once
again in the industry. In the last couple of weeks alone there has been the news
that Steam owners Valve are putting their weight behind the Rift and foresee VR
becoming a consumer reality by 2015; meanwhile, Yahoo! have bought out and
closed down virtual world Cloud Party and lit the fuse on rumours that a Yahoo!
metaverse is in the pipeline.

The edge that SL is likely to have when the Rift launches is
that it’s already compatible with the headset and could presumably be accessed
through it just as soon as it’s out of the box. If you’re lucky enough to be
unwrapping a Rift on Christmas morning 2014, therefore, but don’t have any compatible
games to use it with, you’ll be able to plug it into a free SL account right
there and then. Indeed, if the Rift does make it to the Christmas 2014 market
then 25 December this year could just be the laggiest day in SL history. But
don’t worry – I’m sure Linden has a plan for that...

Of course it all depends on how big the take-up for the Rift
actually is and who the buyers are (let’s not forget there are age restrictions
for accessing SL). But let’s assume for the moment that the rumblings of VR
being the Next Big Thing are correct and SL sees a surge of new users keen to
try out their new hardware on what, to some extent, could be considered the
freebie game included in the box (the VR equivalent, if you like, of ‘Wii
Sports’ only without your grandmother playing bowling). Whilst most of us would
welcome new interest in SL (for two reasons: 1) a bigger user base might
stimulate greater investment in SL, both from Linden and from third parties,
and 2) more people using SL might mean that the rest of us don’t need to feel
quite so socially outcast in admitting our residency and trying to make it
sound better by using such phrases as, “I belong to an online community”),
would this actually constitute the holy grail of mainstream involvement that’s
so far eluded our aging virtual world?

It’s been argued that SL’s long-term problem has been less
about attracting new users and more about keeping them. The resulting focus on
user retention led to a new viewer design intended to be easier for the newbie
to use (and which you’d be forgiven for thinking was the coming of the
anti-Christ from the reaction it got from long-term residents), some noncommittal
talk about making the grid accessible via a web browser and a number of
attempts at making the first half hour as straightforward and as interesting as
possible. None of this addressed the issue of lag, which became the big, grey,
unrezzed elephant stuck in the corner of the room that we were encouraged not
to talk about since there was very little that could be done about it in the
era of ADSL connections. For me, however, this was always the biggest barrier.
The one RL friend I managed to coax into SL lasted no more than forty-five
minutes because he could only see puffs of floating smoke for avatars and
couldn’t move an inch from the spot he landed in; the interface he had no
problem with at all.

But the ADSL era is now starting to come to an end. Whilst SL on a fibre-optic connection doesn’t
cure lag completely, it’s undeniably
a better experience. During the very long wait for this we’ve had all manner of
graphical improvements added, and the metaverse now looks a great deal more
beautiful than it did back in the day when SL was last a topic in mainstream
discussion. But will all these improvements be enough to retain the
hypothetical virtual reality newcomers?

If the Rift does take off, there will be plenty of other
companies keen to grab for themselves a slice of this virtual, cash-filled pie.
The games market, of course, will be a big part of this and whilst initial
titles – if history is anything to go by – will probably be Rift-enabled versions
of existing games, any momentum built from this could stimulate big players
into hunting down the ‘killer-app’ of VR. We already know of Philip Rosedale’s
‘High Fidelity’ project, and the Yahoo! Acquisition of Cloud Party just might be the beginnings of an
exploration of social media in a metaverse. But these things are potentially
pebbles: if VR really does become the Next Big Thing then it will be less a
question of who is developing for this new media than who isn’t.

What, then, will keep Rift-enabled newbies in SL if the IT
world starts throwing its weight seriously upon new VR projects? There have
been many graphical improvements made to our world – yes – but a lot of these
have that screwed-on feel of medium density fibreboard and require a lot of
work – not to mention an advanced SL skillset – to achieve. I’m aware of such
things as mesh heads and mesh hands and mesh feet as the new must-haves for
fashion-conscious avatars, for example, but which newbie is seriously going to spend time on lining all
these things up precisely and getting the colour matching right? Which newbie
is even going to know about stuff like that? Whilst SL is capable of more stunning avatars than it used to be, then,
Rift-enabled newcomers are likely to look decidedly more blotchy and lumpy, and
probably even more so when viewed up close and in three dimensions through a
virtual reality headset. Yuck.

Iris Ophelia wrote recently on New World Notes (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/01/world-of-warcraft-avatar-revamp.html)
about how World of Warcraft has updated its avatars, and very succinctly
summarised the problem that Linden would have in doing a similar thing: whilst
higher definition avies in SL would undoubtedly look much better, they’d break
a huge percentage of existing SL wardrobe and cause outrage amongst residents. Perhaps,
then, the only way forward is through all-mesh avatars, and from the moment
that the new user signs up. But, rather than making SL a more attractive place
for recently arrived residents, such strategies are really only considering how
to reduce its ugliness; more a thinking about fixing the things that might turn
people off SL rather than creating the things that might turn them on to it.

Alongside trying to figure why it is that many people leave
the metaverse quickly, then, it might just be worth spending a little time
considering why it is that some don’t. Speaking personally, whilst SL was just
‘an online game’ to me I felt no sense of attachment to it whatsoever; it was
only when it started feeling like a collection of actual places that the
addiction began to set in, and the time leading up to that point I spent
achieving very little and wondering what on Earth the point was in it all. For
those of us who stick with it, our ultimate sense of immersion in SL comes not
from the graphics environment as much as it does the sense of connection to the
places and people we find. Second Life
is entirely the wrong name for this package: it’s a second world we discover, in which our one and only life gets itself a
little bit more space to exist in than we previously thought possible. When it
does capture us, it’s because SL has taken us by surprise.

The things that build this sense of connection to virtual
places include the events that take place in them. I’ve visited countless art
galleries in my time in SL and open mic venues and bars and clubs and theatres
and learning spaces and role play regions; what’s made them most real are the
exhibition openings and readings and concerts and performances and award
ceremonies (yes, really) and meetings and classes that have happened in them.
The more I think about it, however, the more I become convinced that the single
biggest thing that keeps me most rooted in the metaverse is having a home
there. If only SL were like Facebook or Twitter or Blogger or any of the other
social networking phenomena where it’s been worked out that giving folk a free
little bit of it to decorate and call their own is one of the key ingredients
to making it sticky. What’s needed in SL, I think, is a free basic home for all
users.

I know this will likely never happen, but it won’t not
happen for technical reasons when a physical place in the metaverse is only
storage space and processor time on a server somewhere; it will likely not
happen because of the politics of it all, and the outrage and the vitriol which
will probably make going peacefully into liquidation appear a much more
attractive and dignified option. Which is a shame, because the free home wouldn’t
have to be big: with today’s low impact mesh, it should be perfectly possible
to furnish a basic skybox for what we old timers would call 50 prims and people
who wanted more than that could buy or rent the extra space the old fashioned
way.

For years now, wannabe commentators like me have been making
such pie-in-the-sky claims with the freedom to make them as unrealistic as we
please. Like the UK Liberal Democrat Party, you can visualise all you want when
you’re not ever going to be in a position to have to make any of it actually
happen. Where things are different now, however, is that we’re approaching a
possible threshold point where that dreamed of mainstream metaverse might
actually be lurking round the corner; if there is serious money to be made from
virtual reality, people will be
looking for the model which resonates most with what people want. Competitors
bringing new products to the market really won’t give a damn about doing in
their world the things that in SL would incur the wrath of land owners or
content sellers or any other resident who thinks maintaining the status quo of
their business model is more important than preventing their whole world from
going bankrupt.

If SL can’t adapt then the likelihood is it will be
overtaken. The coming of the Oculus Rift, then, might well usher in Second
Life’s greatest ever moment in the light; it might also, however, herald the
beginning of its end.